As you know, ASIPP has been in the forefront and continuing our advocacy to make telehealth permanent for all insurers and all payers. In addition, we have also been trying to keep telephone only at the same price as face-to-face or telehealth visits (see April 9 letter to Alex Azar and Eric Hargan, May 1 letter to CMS Administrator Seema Verma and May 5 letter to HHS Deputy Azar and Assistant Deputy Hargan).

Good news! Yesterday, HHS Secretary stated that, “HHS will do everything it can to permanently keep telehealth waivers granted during the pandemic” at The Hill virtual event on the future of health care.

Azar’s commitment to push regulatory or legislative reforms to keep the COVID-19 telehealth flexibilities comes as hundreds of provider and patient organizations press HHS to continue telehealth waivers after the pandemic.

“I’ve been traveling all over the country and I visit with doctors and hospitals and nursing homes. I think we’d have a revolution if anyone tried to go backwards on this,” Azar said. “This is now I think an embedded part of our health care system.”

Azar said getting Medicare and Medicaid treatment out of its “1960s-style of delivery” was something the department had always wanted to do, but Congress had never been able to change the Social Security Act to make the programs amenable to telehealth.

The argument Azar is making sits inside a wider pandemic-era pattern that ran well beyond healthcare. The same months that pushed millions of Medicare patients into video appointments also drove permanent migrations to mobile banking and grocery delivery, mail-order prescription fulfillment, remote work, and sharp revenue increases at the online casinos operating in the US states where iGaming was already legal — New Jersey’s licensed operators posted their strongest revenue figures on record while Atlantic City sat closed, with similar trajectories in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Each of those sectors is now facing a version of the question ASIPP is putting to HHS: let the COVID-era flexibilities become permanent policy, or try to walk consumers back to a pre-pandemic delivery model the public itself has already moved past. Azar’s signal on telehealth points clearly in one direction.

ASIPP will keep you posted with updates.